Recent evidence would seem to indicate that it was the FBI, at the
direction of J. Edgar Hoover, not the Chicago police as widely believed,
who engineered the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton
on December 4, 1969. In 1976, Hampton's family, the family of Mark Clark
(another Panther slain in the raid), and survivors of the raid filed
a $47.5 million civil suit in Chicago against 28 local, state, and federal
officials. The suit alleges that the occupants of Hampton's apartment
were deprived of their civil rights, that the seven survivors were maliciously
and falsely prosecuted, and that there was a conspiracy to hide the
true facts surrounding the raid. The thousands of. pages of FBI memos
(many signed by J. Edgar Hoover) now released would seem to support
the accusations. One such document authorizes the payment of a $300
bonus to an FBI informant who had succeeded in infiltrating the Chicago
Panther Party. That informant, later identified as William O'Neil, eventually
became Hampton's personal body guard. It was O'Neil who supplied the
FBI, and the Chicago police tactical squad, with a detailed floor-plan
of Hampton's apartment, a floor-plan the police referred to extensively
during the raid. O'Neil is a key witness in the case, and, according
to the evidence, still on the federal payroll at.$ 3,000 a month. The
mantle of secrecy shrouding the Chicago trial, the nearly obstructive
manner in which Judge Perry has conducted the trial, and the near-total
lack of coverage by the mass media qualifies the Fred Hampton story
for nomination as one of the "ten best censored" stories of
1976.